1. Field
This invention relates to the field of image generation, more specifically generating images to be sent to a raster device.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Printing devices encompass a wide variety of output display devices. These output display devices such as laser printers, bubble jet printers, plotters, image setters and other printing devices produce an image or visual representation on the surface of paper or similar materials. Many printing devices form images on a surface by printing dots corresponding to information contained in a bitmap or pixelmap. A raster printing device, for example, forms an image on a surface by printing dots arranged in rows and columns based upon a corresponding pixelmap.
Applications running on a computer system may generate a number of pages or images that are requested to be printed together. This collected group of images and pages is often referred to as a job. A number of jobs can often be requested in a period of time shorter than each job can be printed. These jobs are often queued to be printed after a previously scheduled job is completed.
Pages in a job are often described in a page description language (PDL) which is a high level language for describing objects to be displayed by an output device. These languages are usually interpreted languages that allow for a compact representation of a page.